


Keep the Candle Burning

by shamusandstone (theleaveswant)



Category: Firefly
Genre: Gen, Holiday, Winter Solstice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-09 02:33:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/82028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theleaveswant/pseuds/shamusandstone
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Serenity's grounded by a blizzard. River calls Mal in from the cold.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Keep the Candle Burning

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mollivanders](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Mollivanders).



> For Mollivanders, whose Wishlist asked for holiday fluff and Mal, and who got stuck in an airport (been there, it sucks) the weekend before Solstice/Christmas/etc. I'm not sure this qualifies as fluff, but here it is.

Mal drops his head back and glares up through the cockpit ceiling drifted over with twinkling snow. He drums impatiently on the tops of his thighs and mutters, "S'pose it were a vain, deluded hope, thinking that having one's own ship would mean an end to waiting on weather."

He jumps at the sudden jingling behind him, spins to find River standing still and ballet-graceful with Inara's dancing bells buckled around her ankles (there goes his fantasy that fixing her with a cat-collar would dampen her creepymaking stealthitude) and a synthetic wreath of leaves and berries on her head. "Blizzard won't stop for another six hours, at least. Come down to the galley, everyone else is there."

"What's the occasion?" He nods at her foliary finery.

"Winter solstice. The tilt of the planet's axis has carried this hemisphere away from its star and turned its face to the Black, the cold and lonely forsaken season," she demonstrates by listing left and turning a slow pirouette. Her weighted feet shiver musically, mournfully. One red berry drops from her crown and bounces down the steps. "Tonight is the longest night of the year. Tonight we keep vigil, waiting for the return of the life-giving Sun. We lure it back by sympathetic magic, with fire and noise and green things. We wait for our world to get better, and in the mean-time we keep each other warm."

He blinks, unnerved at how her words echo his mother's back on Shadow, every year of his childhood when, just before the Christmas feast, she'd call for silence and strike a match, setting flame to wick as she spoke. "Tonight," she'd say, "like our ancestors long ago on Earth-that-was, we cherish the darkness and celebrate the light. This flame is our faith, our love. Through our coldest days and longest nights, we keep this candle burning and we keep each other warm." Mal hasn't observed Christmas or solstice or any other holiday since the war. Instead he's railed against it, gone out of his way to avoid other people's celebrations. He just couldn't face it. The snow settled like sleep, a quiet, suffocating weight.

River jingles again as she glides forward to take his hands in hers, warm and light as birds. "The circumstance's a coincidence, the blizzard's pathetic fallacy. You've been years in your cold season, months in your long night. We all have. The flame is guttering. Harsh breezes will always threaten to blow it out, that's inevitable. But it's still burning, and we can nurse it back to brightness."

He snorts. "All that shiny treasure's is in the galley, is it?"

River smiles, stands and twirls. "Maybe. I know you'll find music, and spiced cider if you hurry."

She skips noisily away down the corridor, giggling when she reaches the end. Mal glances out again at the snow-swaddled woods, stained luminescent blue with filtered moonlight, then follows her into Serenity's warm belly, smiling in spite of himself.


End file.
